Check my privilege? I have, thanks. You’re still wrong

This week, I bring you a dispatch from the frontline of pseudo-intellectual, metropolitan navel-gazing. This is, after all, what you pay me for. So right now the big thing for people who consider themselves warriors against nasty isms and phobias (of the sexism and homophobia varieties, not the Blairism and arachnophobia varieties) is to undermine each other constantly via accusations of intrinsic privilege.

‘I am a feminist!’ declares somebody, via a book or blog or Tumblr or tweet.

‘Aha!’ retort others, ever vigilant for this sort of thing. ‘But have you canvassed the views of Somalian refugees who are weekending female impersonators in Anglesea?’

‘Um, no?’ replies our proto-feminist.

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‘Check your privilege!’ retort the angry denizens of cyberspace. ‘You are a tool of the patriarchy! Go to hell!’

Seriously. That’s how it works. No, I don’t know what they get out of it either.

Granted, you may be wondering why you should give a damn. ‘This is The Spectator, Rifkind,’ you may be thinking. ‘Let the radical left undermine each other however they please.’ But I’m afraid intervention is required. For one thing, this instinct — to shriek ‘check your privilege!’ at anybody who says anything and then consider this the end of an argument — is pernicious, and spreading, to the extent that it’s only a matter of time before somebody does it in a newspaper that isn’t the Guardian. More importantly, it’s simply screamingly annoying when people piously employ arguments they don’t understand at all. Wrongness I can stomach. Incoherence of wrongness, not so much.

It comes, all this stuff, from the vogueish notion of intersectionality — the contention that hardly anybody who is marginalised is marginalised for just one reason, and if you focus on the main reason for their marginalisation then the more marginalised bits of their marginalisation end up being more marginalised still.